← The Origins Foundation Podcast
The Origins Foundation Podcast
Episode 564 - Evan Siembida || Nerding Out On Knives
00:42:36
Evan Siembida is a knife maker out of Ohio that Robbie got to know through Instagram. Evan generously provided an incredible custom knife for the Blood Origins silent auction and joins the podcast today for a straight up nerd session about knife making. Stick around all the way to the end for Evan’s contact info if you’d like one of the knives we actually auctioned off in our silent auction at the exclusive ConservationONE event this past spring! He has built 6 of the knives, 1 was auctioned and 5 are still available!!! First come first served!
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- [00:00]
Fishingbooker
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- [00:07]
Robert Arrington
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- [00:41]
Midway USA Brand
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- [01:07]
Mike Axelrod
Midway USA.com Evan Simbida is a knife maker out of Ohio. I got to know him through Instagram and Evan was so gracious to supply us a knife, a custom knife for our silent auction tied to the Conservation One event that we held at the beginning of March. Little did you know that that knife that he created, that custom knife that he created, he actually created five other knives. And so if you missed out on that knife, you'll be able to purchase one of those knives by reaching out to Evan and you'll get his contact information at the end of this podcast. But this podcast really is me being a little bit of a nerd and trying to understand the knife making world. Evan's the first person that I've really had on the podcast that is living and breathing it because it's his full time job. And so I think you'll find the podcast interesting. I think you'll find the podcast answering some of the questions that you may have around knives and how they're made and why they're made and that kind of stuff. So enjoy. So there's a reason why I started Blood Origins, and that reason is simple, is that I wanted to convey the truth about hunting.
- [02:25]
Evan Simbita
It brings awareness to non hunters that it's more than just killing animals. How do I start it? Brittany My name? Does my hair look okay?
- [02:39]
Mike Axelrod
My name is Mike Axelrod. Start Again. Yeah, I hated it too. Braxton, you said something in the car to me. You said that you were living on borrowed time. There's a perception around who hunters are, what we're supposed to be. And a feminist that works for a nonprofit that is a hunter that has only eaten wild game for the last 20 years is likely not the thing that people think about when it comes to a hunter. So I think in the Instagram post already, I apologize because I'm not going to say it today. I'm going to let you do it. But being a South African trying to say your last name, I have. Did I mess it up when I did it before?
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Evan Simbita
No, you, you were really close. Like you were like 99%. It's symbiotic.
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Mike Axelrod
Oh, Simbita.
- [03:35]
Evan Simbita
Yep, yep. The ie is, it's Polish, so. And it's been Americanized since then. So yeah, it's. It's a weird last name.
- [03:42]
Mike Axelrod
Yeah, I said cm. CM Bidder or something like that.
- [03:47]
Evan Simbita
You're real close.
- [03:49]
Mike Axelrod
Evan Simbita.
- [03:51]
Evan Simbita
Sambida.
- [03:52]
Mike Axelrod
Sambida. Sorry.
- [03:53]
Evan Simbita
Yeah, there you go.
- [03:54]
Mike Axelrod
I messed it up again. I messed it up again. To phonetically say that. C. Okay, there we go. Simbita.
- [04:03]
Evan Simbita
Yeah.
- [04:04]
Mike Axelrod
All right. Ever knife maker extraordinaire, Right.
- [04:12]
Evan Simbita
I don't know about extraordinaire, but I do what I love and I love whatever.
- [04:17]
Mike Axelrod
Introduce yourself.
- [04:18]
Evan Simbita
Yeah, My name is Evan Simbita. I'm a knife maker from southeastern Ohio, pretty heavily involved in the outdoor industry. I make knives for just about everybody and I hunt as often as I can.
- [04:32]
Mike Axelrod
So. But when we pretty much it. When we were connecting. You have, you haven't always been a full time knife maker, right? You obviously this is a passion project of yours.
- [04:44]
Evan Simbita
Well, it's a, it's my. Yeah. Full time gig now. It's been a side like. Well, it started when I was. Oh shoot. Right out of high school. I was just interested in making knives. It was one of those things that my dad, who is a mechanic, he had as a lot of mechanics do buckets of just random fasteners and old files and whatever else laying around. And he said I could have some of the files to play with. So I ground some knives out of it, you know, and then tried heat treating them with the torch. And they held an edge. They weren't great, but they, they worked and I was hooked. So back and forth between making some stuff whenever I had time and then college and then working in a factory full time for, oh shoot, seven, almost eight years. It was just a thing that sort of evolved over time as just a, a project on the side that I love doing. And eventually I ended up getting people that wanted to buy my stuff. And so that sort of evolved into a side hustle which ultimately turned into a full time thing. That's all I do now.
- [05:43]
Mike Axelrod
So when it comes to a knife maker, again, I'm, I'm completely in the dark. Okay, how does that work? Do you. Because. Oh, are they, are they things that. How do I say this? Like, this is how. How? Like unprepared I am for understanding. What are they like copyrights to knives? Like the shape of the knife? Like, because are they. Everyone's making the same shape of knife. Would you want to separate yourself in terms of a shape of a knife? What happens there?
- [06:20]
Evan Simbita
Well, so you can copyright your knives. Some people do. A lot of knife makers don't. I don't. So technically speaking, somebody could rip off my designs that they wanted to, but you'd have a hard time selling one of my knives and claiming it's mine. Because then, you know, why would they.
- [06:36]
Mike Axelrod
Claim it was yours though? It was this.
- [06:39]
Evan Simbita
If they just wanted to counterfeit it. That's the only reason why you could do that. Other than that, if somebody wanted to rip off my design and claim it as theirs, I mean, there's nothing really stopping them from doing that technically. But people buy my stuff not just because of the shape it is, they buy it because it's mine.
- [06:54]
Mike Axelrod
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- [10:22]
Evan Simbita
Oh, ab. Absolutely. It's just like any other. Like, I hesitate to call what I do art, but there is an art Element to it in that everything sort of flows and everything is, you know, based on feel and things like that. Somebody who buys pottery, I mean, you can go to Ikea and you could buy a set of coffee cups for five bucks. They all match and they hold coffee just like anything else. But some people like to go and get something that's ceramic, that's handmade by a person in a small shop, and they pay significantly more. But they're getting something that's handmade, that's got, I don't like, a piece of their soul put into that. You know, there's something about the way that, that, you know, the pottery flows and the shape and everything else that's different than just something that's been molded in cast and mass. It's the same thing with my knives. So you can go and you can buy something from Benchmade or Buck or Case. And they're great knives. They're stamped out by presses or plasma cut and almost entirely automated and how they're made. And while they were great, they're pretty soulless just because they're produced in mass. Every knife that you buy that has my logo on it has been made by me. It's been hand fitted, hand shaped. I pick up a knife 100 times and feel it in my hands before I put it in the box and send it to the customer. So it's. It's past an extreme level of quality. I mean, I'm still human. I still mess up once in a great while, but I have a warranty for that. Everything has been made by hand for me. So. And that applies to my design. So, like, for example, I've got. This is my magpie model. This is actually one of the first, which is. This is four years old. I designed this knife around a time where I spent a lot of time skinning deer for a friend of mine who's a deer processor. He's a deer processor and he's a taxidermist. And he pays people to come in and skin deer for him while he handles paperwork. Deer season's really crazy. He gets in shoot 20 or 30 deer a day for most of deer season. So I got the opportunity because he's my taxidermist, I got the opportunity to skin deer, get a lot more experience cutting up deer, which is beneficial to me as a knife maker and more deer than I could that I could harvest in a year. Even if I had 100 tags, I couldn't spend that much time harvesting deer. So I get more experience cutting. And I also got to Work off my taxidermy bill, which is a benefit for me. But this knife was actually designed based around my time there. I skinned.
- [12:50]
Mike Axelrod
Okay, well, let's. Let's. Let's pause right here. Let's pause right here, and let's get nerdy a little bit. Okay.
- [12:55]
Evan Simbita
All right, go ahead. Yeah. What do you got?
- [12:57]
Mike Axelrod
As you are skinning a whitetail and you're using. Let's. I don't know what kind of knife you were using. You can tell me. And I want to know your thought process on, like, what is going through your mind as you're skinning to say, oh, this is what I'm look. Is it durability? Is it sharpness? Is it ease of use? Is it how it feels in your hand? Maybe it's all of the above. And then how I want to know, like, how that you take that information and it translates into the magpie that's in your hand.
- [13:37]
Evan Simbita
Yeah, piece of cake. So it's actually all of those. And like I said, I was skinning a lot of deer, right? So, like, one day I might come in and skin, but one day, I think I skin 25 deer in a day, which is a lot. Like, when you're skinning deer, you're pulling on hides and everything else. Your hands, your wrists, your arms, everything's sore. But your hands feel the most, you know, because you're gripping this knife. And if it's not super comfortable, and if the blade angle and the spine. Angle of the spine isn't efficient for, you know, use with the human body, which, you know, we have limitations in our flexibility and stuff, then you're going to feel more fatigue. And so, like, primarily, like, your first cuts when you're skinning a deer. Anybody that knows. Anybody that skins deer knows this. Anybody hasn't? Well, you're about to find out. But you work down the inside of the arms and the same on the legs until those cuts connect. And then you run right up the chest, and then you just kind of feel everything back. A lot of people will work down through, or they'll sit there and they'll try to work through, you know, cutting up through the hide so they don't cut the hair. I wanted a knife that I could stick the tip in and the edge facing up, the edge up and just run right down. And the back of that knife is riding against the meat and the bone, and the edge is doing all the work. And I can, in a single cut, zip right down the leg. And that's what I wanted. Something that Would do what all those gut hook knives out there do without having that.
- [14:58]
Mike Axelrod
I'm about to say, that's a gut hook to me. Like, you put a gut hook in and you're worried. Not worried about puncturing, but rather, it's just a smooth slide.
- [15:07]
Evan Simbita
And see, and those are handy. But you have two options with those. Either one, you have a separate gut hook, which. That's one more thing you gotta pack and forget or whatever else. Or you have one attached to your knife, you know, ground into the back of the knife, which is. You're not going to forget it then. But it's clunky, it sticks out. It's in the way. It makes your tip a lot less narrow and less nimble. It's harder to do caping jobs and skin, you know, heads on bears and things like that. So I'm not a big fan of those. They're super efficient for what they do, but they make the knife clunky. And as a separate one, that's just one more thing I've got to pack. So I wanted a knife. I could do that with the tip. And so there's a couple renditions I made of this. This is the final one. And basically I'd go to go to work.
- [15:48]
Mike Axelrod
So let's talk about the first renditions. What was. Why. Why did. What was the first rendition? And why did you change it to a second and third and fourth?
- [15:56]
Evan Simbita
So the first rendition had a. It had a little bit blunter or more aggressive of a belly here. So the tip was less fine. The spine went out almost perfectly straight and then humped down. And, you know, the thought process was it would go in and that hump away would keep you from cutting into the meat, you know, as you're zip doing the zipping cuts. And it was just too aggressive. So I brought it back a little.
- [16:20]
Mike Axelrod
More too aggressive in terms of like, it poked through it got used to the meats in the cavity.
- [16:25]
Evan Simbita
The curve was too aggressive this way. So I had to be more aggressive and work the angle steeper to cut down the deer, which made more fatigue on my wrist. And it made it harder to control. It's easier to control when it's going straight than it is like this. So I ground that back the next week and I worked on that again. I found that it was still. I still didn't like the fact that there was a hump there. And I didn't like that there was so much belly in the edge. It just made it. It made it blunter than it needed to Be to be efficient.
- [16:52]
Mike Axelrod
And when you say more belly in the edge, again, I'm a freaking neo.
- [16:56]
Evan Simbita
Yeah, no problem.
- [16:56]
Mike Axelrod
Okay. And that's why I'm asking these dumb questions, because people are going to Robbie. What? I don't know what he's talking about either. So if you watch this on YouTube, Aaron is showing us the knife on YouTube. Otherwise, if you're not listening to this in your vehicle, you're just going to have to imagine this.
- [17:10]
Evan Simbita
Well, so, so the belly on the edge. Think about, you know, if you have a beer belly, for example. Your belly sticks out, right? Well, that's the curve of the edge from the handle to the tip. It's not straight. It's got belly. It sags. The edge curves. The more belly you have, the more the edge protrudes away from that line between the tip and the handle.
- [17:30]
Mike Axelrod
So there are knives out there, the big, the big Skinner knives. That belly will sit underneath the handle, right? It drops underneath the handle. Okay, okay.
- [17:38]
Evan Simbita
Exactly. So. And that belly is beneficial because it's, it's. It gives you more edge. You get more surface area of edge to work with for a given blade length. And long. More belly means you can make sweeping cuts without using the tip of your knives. You're less likely to nick into certain things. So when you're laying open, say for example, like the, the skin around the arms, the front shoulders, working in the armpit and things like that on a deer or any of your servants, that belly is beneficial for that kind of thing. But that said, the more belly you add to a knife, the less your tip is pronounced. And the tip is what we use for all of our fine cuts. So when you're working around, if you're, say you're a backcountry hunter, you're probably not going to pack out the whole head of your mule deer. You're probably going to skin the whole head out and take the skull cap and, you know, leave the rest of the skull back behind with your guts. Skin that head out in the backcountry. You know, it's really beneficial to have a tip using a big, blunt, blunt nose, you know, shovel nose knife with a bunch of belly is great, working on the rest of the deer, but that tip is what you need to skin the head out. So I wanted something that could do that. Um, so ultimately that's kind of where I came to. And with this, this knife, I. Oh, my goodness. I don't even know how many deer I skinned with this knife. This is the final rendition. And ultimately I Arrived on. I arrived on a steel called Magnacut. It was a new steel at the time. Now it's. You can't.
- [19:04]
Mike Axelrod
Look, everybody uses Magnacut, right?
- [19:06]
Evan Simbita
I was going to say you can't Google the word magic without your phone or computer breaking.
- [19:11]
Mike Axelrod
Why is Magnacut such a good steel?
- [19:14]
Evan Simbita
Well, yeah, so this is getting into the nerd stuff. So the knife seals are kind of like rifle cartridges. We all love rifle cartridges, you know, and it. Magnacut was kind of like the 7 millimeter PRC of knife seals. It didn't do any one thing that was drastically better than everything else, but it did all those different things without giving up other things. So traditionally, you have edge retention, you have strength, and you have corrosion resistance. Those are the three attributes that make up a knife steel. And there's nuances between those, but those are your three attributes. In order to have one of those be one or two of those excel, the other one has to go down. So you look at your, your cheap, you know, like the really cheap budget knives from Buck or Case, and they make some really phenomenal classy knives too. I'm not, I'm not ragging on, but they're like their budget builds, the ones that you buy at Walmart. They never rust, like, ever. I don't think I've ever seen a rusty knife.
- [20:11]
Mike Axelrod
Interesting.
- [20:12]
Evan Simbita
420, you know, stainless steel. But the reason that's what those knives.
- [20:17]
Mike Axelrod
Are made out of is 420 stainless steel.
- [20:19]
Evan Simbita
Usually 420 or 440A, B or C. And now those, those knives just never rust. And they're easy to sharpen, but they don't hold an edge for very long. And you find a lot of those with broken tips, they're not very strong. Like, the steel's not very strong. And what that comes from is when you add chromium to steel, that's what makes it stainless, chromium, nickel, a few other things. But chromium is typically what improves your, your corrosion resistance a lot. And when you add elements to steel, those react with each other and cause the carbides in the steel, which are the things that make it resistant to going dull, makes the carbides in the steel change. When you add chromium, it makes your carbides coarse. Coarse carbides are harder to sharpen to a fine edge. And because they're coarse, they also happen to make the knife brittle. So when you add. And I'm, I'm dumbing this down, I'm not nearly. No, the guys that make. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm not nearly as, I'm not nearly as smart as the guys that invent these deals. But. But the general gist of it is when you traditionally make a knife more corrosion resistant, you're making the knife more brittle at the same time. That's why a lot of the old timers are like, I want those newfangled stainless steel knives. They don't hold an edge or whatever else. And they're not entirely wrong. The old stainless steel's the first generation stainless knife steels weren't very durable and they wouldn't hold an edge very well. But get into modern steels like you go all the way to like the most modern of hard use stainless steels, which is Magnacut. A guy named Laron Thomas, who's a metallurgist, that's kind of like what he does, he was experimenting with adding nitrogen to steel, the same stuff that's in our atmosphere. He found out that nitrogen had a weird side effect to adding it to steels was it allowed carbides to dissolve. So instead of being really, really big and coarse and chunky, which I mean you couldn't see em with the naked eye, but like if you looked under a microscope, they would look like these chunky crystals. When he added nitrogen, it allowed those to dissolve and become almost non existent. They had all the benefits without the coarse chunky carbide.
- [22:27]
Mike Axelrod
Interesting.
- [22:27]
Evan Simbita
And so he was able to get away with using much less chromium to get the same effect of being stainless. And then he got a more wear resistant steel that held the magnacut.
- [22:39]
Mike Axelrod
The shininess is that stainless look, right?
- [22:43]
Evan Simbita
No, I mean you can make any steel shiny. You can make iron shiny. It's just whether or not it stays shiny. Okay, but all these elements we're talking about, you can't see with the naked eye. Steel looks like steel. It's the performance of the finished product that that is affected. But by adding, by adding nitrogen to the steel, he was allowed or able to get away with using drastically less chromium. So a lot. There are some steels that use 15, 16% chromium to get that level of corrosion resistant resistance. And Magna Cut only uses, off the top of my head, I want to say it's 8% chromium, 10% chromium is very low. And it ends up with drastically more corrosion resistance than a lot of the other steels that have drastically more chromium. And it also has better edge retention and it's stronger. So it's, it's got more, better edge.
- [23:39]
Mike Axelrod
Retention and better and it's stronger because of the reduction of the brittleness of the carbides.
- [23:46]
Evan Simbita
Exactly. And so like basically it's, it's the first deal that basically lets you have your cake and eat it too. To make. Yeah, simple. So it's got better edge retention than a lot of the other high performance deals. It's got better corrosion resistance than a lot of other steels. And it's stronger than most of our stainless steels in the market. So you're a lot less likely to break the tip off if you do something dumb with it. It's not going to corrode. If you happen to be hunting or fishing your saltwater, it's going to hold an edge. I mean like this one right here. I, when I was playing with it, this was the first knife I ever made in Magnacut. I wanted to test it before I offered it to customers. I wanted to see how many deer I could skin with this thing before I needed to sharpen it. And I got through 54 deer before I had to sharpen it.
- [24:31]
Mike Axelrod
Geez.
- [24:32]
Evan Simbita
Yeah, it was pretty insane. Now that's full disclosure.
- [24:35]
Mike Axelrod
And that's just skinning the air, right? That is just. That's skinning the edges and, and pulling it back.
- [24:41]
Evan Simbita
Well, I was. I mean you're working around the whole thing. Like I, I'd pull wherever I could, but most of these deer were chilled. Hunters that take deer to processors, at least around here, tend to shoot something in the evening and bring it to the processor in the morning. So yeah, they've been packed full of ice and you know their ice cold. So the hide's not exactly loose anymore. But. But no, it's. I mean it's pretty stinking good. I wasn't sharpening it at all during that time. The only thing I did do is run it across a chef steel, which is a non abrasive super hard rod that just fixed any rolls from hidden bones. Because I, I did use that to separate a few forelimbs and separate some vertebrae and stuff during all that too. But other than that you got no sharpening. And it's just a testament to how good the steel is. It's fantastic stuff.
- [25:28]
Mike Axelrod
So can you get Magnacut in a non shiny form?
- [25:35]
Evan Simbita
Yeah, I mean there's other things you can do to Magnacut to make it not shiny. So you can.
- [25:39]
Mike Axelrod
But does it come to you shiny?
- [25:41]
Evan Simbita
No. Well, when I buy it, it comes in, it's called hot rolled bars. So basically it comes out of the mill. That makes it. They run it while it's still glowing hot through rollers and roll it down to the thickness that they want and cut it into sheets or strips. And I buy the strips and they're almost black on the surface. They're dark, dark gray. Once I cut it and grind it, it ends up shiny like inevitably. Now there's other options. You can, you can acid etch it, that makes it dark gray. There's a few acids that make them almost black and it's still stainless after doing that. You can be blast it or you can brush finish it to be satin finished. And then there's coating options too. So you could duracoat or cerakote it like you would a rifle and have it be a different color including black or gray or whatever else.
- [26:29]
Mike Axelrod
Okay.
- [26:30]
Evan Simbita
I just like shiny stuff.
- [26:33]
Mike Axelrod
So if I, if I had a almost matte gray, matte black knife that is, is magnacut, it's probably seracoted to.
- [26:49]
Evan Simbita
Look probably or, or it's. If it's matte gray, it could be acid etched as well.
- [26:54]
Mike Axelrod
Okay. No, I think this is. And if I get like a, an orange magnacut blade that Cerakoted.
- [27:01]
Evan Simbita
Oh, that's Cerakoted. Absolutely. Yeah. It's cool stuff. I mean it's, it's just another knife steel. I mean at the end of the day it's just like any other steel. It's, it's produced the same way. It's turned into knives the same way. It's heat treated with different recipe, but roughly the same process. It's just, you know, different internal structure to make it perform different. That's all.
- [27:26]
Mike Axelrod
How many knife makes, builds, options, designs? Maybe designs is the better term. Do you have that you've come up with?
- [27:40]
Evan Simbita
I, I have like three new designs in the works right now. That's. And I've just released two new designs over the last two months. So I've kind of lost count that I want to say it's around 41 or 42 currently.
- [27:55]
Mike Axelrod
Do we need that many knife designs?
- [27:57]
Evan Simbita
Yeah, absolutely.
- [28:00]
Mike Axelrod
Is it like guns? You can never have enough.
- [28:03]
Evan Simbita
Oh, you can never have enough guns. Absolutely.
- [28:05]
Mike Axelrod
Knife design.
- [28:06]
Evan Simbita
Yeah. But not knives. Knives. Absolutely. So I mean initially sounds crazy but you think about the fact I've got oh, probably seven or eight different knives designed specifically for hunters, you know, skinning knives, everything from like the Magpie that I showed you. You know, there's the Magpie again to this little guy which is the Meadowlark and it's about a third of the size and it does the same job. It's not, not as ergonomic. But it's half the weight. And you can drop that in your kill kit or your pack or your pocket. And it's super light. So if you're a, you know, backcountry sheep hunter or whatever else, you've got the same job. I've got bigger skinning knives. I've got knives that are intended for butchering. I've got two different filet knives currently. I've got a boning knife.
- [28:50]
Mike Axelrod
What's the Whiskey Jack? What kind of knife is the Whiskey Jack?
- [28:53]
Evan Simbita
So the Whiskey Jack is a skinning knife and it's actually, it's got the same exact handle contours as the Magpie. In fact, the Whiskey Jack came first, the Magpie came after that.
- [29:03]
Mike Axelrod
And it's based on, it goes the opposite way.
- [29:06]
Evan Simbita
Yeah, the blade curves the opposite way. It's got a little more belly and the spine curves down and back up again. And that gives you a little more, a little longer and narrower point. It's a little more aggressive when it comes to unzipping cuts. You gotta be a little more careful that you don't poke into the viscera, but it makes it a lot faster knife. So when you're working on detail work, you can move a lot faster with that knife. So. But there's all those, I've got a bunch of kitchen knives and you know people that like kitchen knives. There's an endless array of those. And then I've even got crazy stuff like I've got a little side passion project of mine is I like hog hunting down in Texas. I mean, who doesn't, right? But my, my thing is I like, I like doing the traditional southern style. We use hounds and then instead of using firearms, we, we use one of these numbers. So up there, up in close. But this knife was designed specifically for that. So 7 inch blade, it's double edged, a big cross guard and it's extremely light. So yeah, there's an infinite variety of, of the type of knives that build different roles. Some of it's redundant, some of it overlaps.
- [30:14]
Mike Axelrod
So for Blood Origins we did a collaboration knife. It did phenomenally, by the way. What, what if it was. If you sold that Whiskey Jack on your website, what did you say it was retailed for?
- [30:30]
Evan Simbita
That one would have been around. I'm going off the top of my head now and on my calculator I would have say about 400, 420.
- [30:37]
Mike Axelrod
Okay. Okay. Well we made more than 420, so.
- [30:40]
Evan Simbita
Excellent. I'm glad to hear it.
- [30:42]
Mike Axelrod
Yeah. So talk to Tell people, obviously it is. It is sold. The silent auction is done. The Whiskey Jack that you created for us was a custom Whiskey Jack. It was sold. But tell us about what you designed.
- [30:58]
Evan Simbita
Yeah, so it was the Whiskey Jack. I don't have one with me at the moment. My Whiskey Jack is currently buried with my hunting stuff. But it's like I said, it's got the same blade length as the Magpie, which again, is right here. Same handle design, but the blade curves backwards. And it's got sort of a Persian shape. And it's designed for skinning and for the general hunter.
- [31:22]
Mike Axelrod
Yeah, it's very. I would say that's right. That. That's a great. And now it's a very Persian like knife. Yep.
- [31:28]
Evan Simbita
Yeah. And the design came from, actually my uncle, who was my main, like, exposure to hunting growing up. I grew up in a family that didn't really hunt my mom's whole side of the family, who I was closer with than my dad's side. None of them hunted. They all thought, you know, didn't think. But like, they all. If you ask them where food came from, it was the store. Like, they, they never said the woods. My dad's side of the family, most of them weren't hunters. A handful of them would go build a deer tag during deer gun week, but that was about it. But I had two uncles, one of which I got really close to that both were big into hunting. And my Uncle Carl, I became pretty close with him, still really close with him. And he's the one that exposed me to hunting. He got me into hunting deer and small game. And I mean, heck, he was the first person I ever knew that went to Africa on a hunt. I think it was South Africa. But he had. There was a knife that his son was working at, Buck knives at the time, and there was a knife they had with a similar blade shape. And he said, man, I really like this blade shape, but I want to buy a knife from you. He's like, could you do something inspired by that style of knife? And I said, well, I'm not going to make a copy of somebody else's knife. He goes, that's not what I'm asking. He's like, I want you to do something with a similar. It's called a trailing point. He's like, I like the trailing point. And I said, I can do that. So I went to work and designed ultimate, what ultimately became the Whiskey Jack. So trailing point, it was more aggressive in the tip, but a more nimble blade shape than what Buck had that. Their knife was called the Kalinga. You can look it up. Very different knife. But I wanted something was much more nimble and some we didn't actually talk about. Whenever we talked about the handle, the handle actually on this knife. This. I call this my tadpole handle. It's probably what I'm most known for and it's pretty unusual. For those of you guys listening, you should probably look up my stuff and you can see my handles. But it's got this long tail. So the back of the knife is not thick. It's not as thick as the middle or the front of the knife handle and it curves downwards. And the idea was when you're holding a knife, it's curving away from your wrist, from the palm of your hand or back at the heel. And when you're doing working cuts and stuff, that gives you much more flexibility in your wrist without sacrificing comfort and ergonomics. So that ends up becoming a pretty big thing with my designs. But that was probably my first and most developed tadpole handle at the time, was on that knife. It's since then become extremely popular. I've got that knife, I think on every continent except for. Except for Antarctica. Just about every continent has at least one Whiskey Jack. A lot. A lot of guides use them in Alaska. It's a. It's a fantastic knife for that.
- [34:20]
Mike Axelrod
Yeah. And so you made a custom one for us.
- [34:24]
Evan Simbita
Yeah.
- [34:25]
Mike Axelrod
Go through the elements of that custom.
- [34:27]
Evan Simbita
Yeah. So that one was in. And I chose. It's gonna sound surprising because I. We just talked about Magna Cut, how much we love it. That one was an AEB L stainless steel going off member here, which is my other favorite steel. In fact, most of my personal knives are in AEB L stainless steel. It's a steel that was designed specifically for knife making, like Magnacut. Most of our steels today are made for other things and just happen to get side use for knives. ABL was designed for knives designed for razor blades. So it takes a phenomenally thin edge. You can put a scary edge on those. And it's extremely durable. It's probably our most durable stainless knife steel in existence right now. I don't know if one's stronger. It's as strong as some spring steels. It's stainless, it's easy to sharpen. Edge retention still very good. It's extremely low maintenance. There's nothing to not like about aebl. And then I did the handle scales, the slab material on the sides. I did that in giraffe bone, which was really stinking. Cool. I love giraffe.
- [35:30]
Mike Axelrod
So where'd you get. Where do you get giraffe bone? Is it just something that. It's just a commodity that you can buy as a knife maker?
- [35:37]
Evan Simbita
Yeah, actually, there's a pretty decent supply out there of giraffe bone. It sounds. Sounds odd, but you can look it up, like online.
- [35:48]
Mike Axelrod
I can imagine seeing knife makers and your. Your workshop probably may look the same is that you've got all these different bins with all these different materials. Right. You've got horns and you've got bones, and you've got mammoth ivory and you got all sorts of shit.
- [36:02]
Evan Simbita
It's a little bit like that. So I do have two big giraffe shin bones in my shop right now. And why. You've seen giraffe shin bones?
- [36:08]
Mike Axelrod
Yeah, yeah.
- [36:09]
Evan Simbita
But those are raw bones. I still have to process those yet. A friend of mine shot a giraffe and I think was Namibia, last year, two years ago, and he brought back the shin bones. He wants me to do some knives for him with them. But when you buy knives here stateside, processed already, they tend to be what's called stabilized. So if you saw that the knife that I made for you for the. The auction, it had a bunch of color to it. It wasn't just white. Bone, when it comes off a giraffe is just white like anything else.
- [36:36]
Mike Axelrod
Correct.
- [36:37]
Evan Simbita
But it's so thick, it's like half an inch thick before you get to the marrow pocket that as it dries, it dries a different race, the inside, the outside. And it causes a bunch of checking, just like a bunch of seasoned firewood. And that gives you the possibility of adding character to. Also adds porosity. So it can absorb moisture and, you know, whatever else. So it's typically stabilized. And stabilizing is where you put bone or wood or. I mean, there's a bunch of weird stuff, cactus, all kinds of things that they do this with. They'll put it in a resin chamber. So a big. Usually it's PVC pipe, big, huge thing full of resin. The resin is really thin, like water thin. And it's usually dyed. So they'll add black or brown or sometimes even bright colors to the resin. They'll put the stuff inside the resin, they'll seal off the chamber, and they'll draw it under heavy vacuum. So like 30 inches of vacuum. And it'll stay under vacuum for a couple hours to a couple days. And that basically pulls all the air out of those pores, those cracks, and.
- [37:36]
Mike Axelrod
Replaces it with Fills it with resin. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [37:39]
Evan Simbita
And then it's taken out, it's allowed to dry and cure, and then it's processed into slabs. So it's split down the middle, cut into slabs about an inch and a half to two inches wide, five inches long, give or take. And it's sold in book match sets. So it's two pieces, and that's how guys like me tend to buy it. In that. In the case of the. The Blood Origins knife, that was in fossil color. That's what they called it. And it looks just like ancient bone whenever somebody digs something up in Russia or whatever.
- [38:08]
Mike Axelrod
Yep, yep, yep.
- [38:10]
Evan Simbita
So, yeah, so that. That's what we use there. And then I used copper hardware, or. I think it was copper. Yeah, copper hardware.
- [38:18]
Mike Axelrod
Brass.
- [38:19]
Evan Simbita
I think it was brass. Maybe it was brass. I did a bunch of copper recently, so that's why I couldn't remember. Yeah, so it's brass. Brass hardware. I call them Loveless bolts. They're basically a mechanical screw with two nuts that are round. So when it's ground, it looks like a bullseye, but it's. It's mechanically strong. In addition to having the epoxy joint, and then I put really thin blood red liners, which are a thin layer of pinstriping between the material and the blade. So just to finish that off. Beautiful knife.
- [38:49]
Mike Axelrod
Yeah, it's fantastic. And, you know, congrats to the silent auction winner for. For bidding it up and taking it home.
- [38:57]
Evan Simbita
But they got a heck of a knife.
- [38:59]
Mike Axelrod
Yeah. So. But we do have something to release here on this podcast, because in the process, you're like, well, I don't want to just build you one knife. We're going to build six, right?
- [39:10]
Evan Simbita
Yeah. Yeah.
- [39:12]
Mike Axelrod
So we've got five more that we can auction or are up for sale.
- [39:17]
Evan Simbita
Yeah.
- [39:18]
Mike Axelrod
And so the people that I did bid that did not win it, I'm going to reach out to them and tell them about it.
- [39:23]
Evan Simbita
Yeah. And then send them my way. And. And we'll. We'll get one in their hands because those are really stinking cool.
- [39:32]
Mike Axelrod
If anybody's listening to this, everyone's listening to this podcast. And you want one of these knives. You're like, man, I didn't get it at the silent auction. We'll put Evan's details in the show notes. And also you can. You can reach out to you via Instagram. Right.
- [39:48]
Evan Simbita
Instagram. Or text message, phone call. I mean, I'm.
- [39:51]
Mike Axelrod
Well, I don't want to put your number out on this podcast.
- [39:54]
Evan Simbita
My. My number is everywhere. It's on every other podcast I've been on. It's. You can Google my name. My. My number comes up. It's not a secret.
- [40:01]
Mike Axelrod
Okay, well, let's talk about. Let's give them every way they can find you on Instagram first.
- [40:06]
Evan Simbita
Yeah, Instagram's probably the easiest. Facebook is the same. That's the same. You know, same name and everything like that. What is custom Zimbita? Custom knives.
- [40:15]
Mike Axelrod
That's with underscores between them, right?
- [40:18]
Evan Simbita
Yeah. And you can probably put the name or the link on the show notes. But yeah, we'll do that. S, I, E, M, B, I D. A custom knives.
- [40:30]
Mike Axelrod
And then your. Since you're okay with your number going.
- [40:34]
Evan Simbita
Yeah.
- [40:35]
Mike Axelrod
Call or text you at.
- [40:37]
Evan Simbita
Yeah, 740-270-9057. And say that one more time. 740-270-9057.
- [40:51]
Mike Axelrod
Epic.
- [40:52]
Evan Simbita
And it's worth noting, too, that there's only five left. Yeah. And it's worth noting, too. In addition to that, I am a custom knife maker. That's pretty much my bread and butter. So if somebody wants to get on the list to get something made, man, I'd love to make their dream a reality. I do have a wait list. It's around 10 months out right now, which is pretty standard for custom knife makers. So if somebody does want to get a knife or they just want to ask questions and find out, like, hey, I'd like maybe a kitchen knife, a kitchen knife set, a custom knife, whatever, give me a call, ask me, you know, shoot me a text, whatever. I'd love to talk to them and we can talk about the wait list and, you know, get them a spot on there and maybe make them a knife or two.
- [41:31]
Mike Axelrod
Amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing. Well, Evan, thank you so much for, number one, supporting us and stepping up with that knife and appreciate you being a friend of mine and a friend of blood origins. And just again, thank you for all the support.
- [41:48]
Evan Simbita
Yeah, absolutely, man. Anytime.
- [41:51]
Mike Axelrod
Well, I hope we didn't get too nerdy. I needed to. I needed to learn a little bit more about knives, and you're the perfect teacher for it, so thank you so much.
- [42:00]
Evan Simbita
Yeah, well, thanks for having me, man. It was a good time.
- [42:03]
Mike Axelrod
Well, that's it for today. I appreciate you listening, as always. Leave a review, share it with your friends, and most importantly, do what's right to convey the truth around hunting.
- [42:17]
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